Rainsongs Page 13
Go on, Paddy, son, go. And write when you can.
All the time he was away he sent part of his wages home.
It was August when he finally returned just in time for the fair. A party was laid on. An accordion and fiddle player found and a small barrel of Guinness purchased. It wasn’t properly tapped so those nearby got a good soaking of black stuff. The table and chairs were pushed back against the kitchen walls and the dancing lasted till the early hours when the paraffin lamp was turned off and the exhausted neighbours went their separate ways, knowing there was work to be done in the morning.
Despite being the worse for wear, he was up early next day to help his da round up the cattle for the fair. Two or three broke free and forced their way back over the fence to join those that weren’t going. So he had to start all over again.
Ask for more than you expect, son, his father said, as they pushed their bicycles along beside the cows, the fifty miles to Killorgan, past the makeshift creamery at the crossroads where the dairymen with their donkey wagon sold milk straight from the churn.
The roads were alive with cattle, pigs and horses. His da reckoned that before breakfast at least £800 worth of bacon would rush squealing into town. As they approached the lanes, rows of painted barrel wagons were encamped along the verges, a ribbon of smoke curling from their stove chimneys. Already the horses were unharnessed, hobbled and grazing on the banks. The washing strung up on the hawthorn bushes and the fires lit to cook the evening meal. The tinkers made regular forays into town to drink, bargain and beg, causing quarrels with the settled folk.
The place was full to bursting. Men jostling with cows as they tried to reach the pub, cows jostling with men as the animals snatched a mouthful of grass poking from an old stone wall. The streets were ankle deep in dung.
Muck and money.
And on every corner there was some sleight-of-hand merchant. John Joe Collopy with his ‘Six-a-Pick’ card game and a monkey on his shoulder to draw the crowds to the tombola machine that everyone soon realised never stopped on certain numbers. There were barefoot fortune-tellers—a grubby child anchored with a tartan shawl to a swayed hip—who forecast ‘passing over water’ or ‘coming into money’ as they thrust sprigs of heather from dirt engrained hands into the faces of passers-by.
Long before midday the final touches were made to the platform in the square where the Puck goat was to be hoisted. Orange, white and green flags fluttered from the wooden scaffolding. Frank Houligan, your man in charge of catching the goat up on the mountain, had been up since the crack and was now parading the furious animal through the streets on his rickety lorry, followed by the local pipe band. Schoolgirls in their Sunday best were tying green ribbons in their hair, getting ready to perform their céilí dances to ‘The Walls of Limerick’ or ‘The Haymaker’s Jig’. When the goat was finally crowned with the copper crown by that year’s young queen in her homemade regal robes, the tinker lads went wild. Sporting paper hats, their faces blackened with soot, they rode bareback through the town, scattering women, children, and guards in all directions.
That year he and his da had a good fair and finished the day, over a couple of pints, with a few bob in their pockets. Others were less lucky. They felt sorry for the fellas trekking home with tired beasts and empty purses. But he has other things on his mind. The letter from Eugene Riordan is still sitting behind the Aran plate on his dresser and he’s uncertain what to do.
3
Martha is learning to be alone. There’s something pure about the quality of solitude. Like crystal or ice. She can imagine being a nun. Julian of Norwich, perhaps. Her day mapped out by a series of spiritual exercises, periods of contemplation and meditation, alternating with study and work in the garden: keeping bees, hoeing radish and kale, the cultivation of medicinal herbs. Borage, feverfew and rosemary. Days uncomplicated by the loss of love and human attachment. Other cultures provided a designated period for mourning. In rural Greece bereaved women mourned for five years. They talked of visiting, not a grave, but a husband or daughter. It was understood that grieving takes time. The end of the mourning period happened only after the body was exhumed and the bones placed in a metal box to join other relations in the local ossuary. Friends and relatives wore black clothes and armbands to alert others to their plight. But her mourning has mostly taken place in the long watches of the night and in the solitary recesses of her mind.
For months she refused to move anything in Bruno’s room. To unpack the rucksack of dirty clothes returned from the cub camp until it began to smell and grow mildew and she had to throw it out. When Brendan couldn’t comfort her he began to avoid her. He must have been with Sophie the afternoon she crawled into Bruno’s bed sobbing and clinging to his bald panda until she could cry no more. She lay for hours in his cold room, her face and eyes red and swollen, staring helplessly at the ceiling.
She took up swimming. Going to the pool early when she couldn’t sleep. She slipped into her old black costume, bundled her things into a locker and tiptoed out avoiding the muddy puddles between the duck boards. At 6.30 the place was usually fairly empty apart from a cleaner mopping the tiled floor and the same old man in goggles plodding up and down the slow lane as water ran off his walrus moustache and skinny arms. Standing with her toes curled over the edge of the pool, ignoring the No Diving signs, she plunged into the chlorinated water, a stream of bubbles floating like a soda stream up behind her as she pushed on, length after mindless length, the muscles in her chest and shoulders flexing and expanding against the glass wall of water, her heart pounding as physical exertion stilled her unquiet mind.
She walked to the pool. Or, if it was raining, caught the bus with the early-morning office workers, sitting squashed on the top deck between the Eastern European office cleaners or the broad-hipped African woman who always sat in the same seat, her cheeks engraved with cicatrices, a wicker shopping basket on her lap, her broad feet splayed in gold sandals whatever the weather. Martha was fascinated by her hair woven into intricate braids like the threads that held together the fragile fabric of the city.
Recently she’d read a disturbing story in the Islington Gazette about an old couple that lived on the nearby Peabody estate. The man had worked for the Post Office for over 40 years. After he retired he rarely went out. Occasionally he was seen shuffling to the corner shop in his slippers. He’d nod to the Turkish proprietor, pick up the Daily Mirror, a carton of milk, a pack of Senior Service and two cans of baked beans. Neighbours often saw him on the stairs struggling with heavy black bin bags. There were reports of a strange smell coming from the top flat. Tenants phoned the council. A health inspector was sent round but unable to get in. People began to leave notes. But the stench just got worse. There were sightings of vermin. Then, one morning, the young Bangladeshi woman from the floor below heard a scream. She dashed upstairs and found the old lady bent over a heap of rags on the top landing. It was her husband. He’d had a stroke. An ambulance was called. But the old woman wouldn’t let them take him away unless she went too. They’d never spent a day apart in fifty years she told the paramedics, visibly upset. While they were at the hospital the workmen, putting up scaffolding at the back of the building, broke into the flat.
Every room was packed with putrefying bin bags. The bedroom, the kitchen, even the bath. The old man had been bringing back all the refuse left out in the street. How had it started? What had motivated him to drag that filth up four flights? Had their lives been so colourless, so drab that they felt compelled to recycle the detritus of other people in order to feel they existed?
4
Yesterday afternoon Martha had walked up past Bolus Head to the Napoleonic tower on the headland. The day was dying and the light already fading, diluted by immense diaphanous shadows. The impassive stones and rocks seemed to reverberate with memories. As she stood in the squally wind, looking out across the darkening bay, she suddenly felt very insignificant. As i
f merged with the rough brown scrub dotted with megalithic stones and sheep, the grey mountains and vista of metallic sea. Was this how Caspar David Friedrich felt as he looked out from his crag into the hazy distance? Or stout Cortez when, eagle-eyed on his peak in Darien, he gazed over the Pacific Ocean? Freud dismissed such feelings as being akin to faith. But they didn’t have to be specifically religious did they? Weren’t they simply a measure of human consciousness? A desire for transcendence beyond the humdrum? The need to give meaning to what so often felt meaningless? Underneath the hubbub and razzmatazz, the rush of crowded streets, wasn’t there a single pure note for which we all yearned? Her feelings might be similar to those of religious mystics but that didn’t mean there was no other way they could be understood. Wasn’t it a love of sorts that connected her to her late husband and child? To the histories of all those who’d lived and suffered in this wild place?
5
She takes Colm’s manuscript from the carrier bag, opens a bottle of red wine and settles herself by the fire. She doesn’t know what to expect. For some reason he’s typed the poems on an old typewriter so the ‘e’s and ‘a’s are slightly higher than the rest of the letters. She reads slowly at first, trying to find her way through the imagery. It’s a while since she’s read any poetry and, at first, she finds it tricky to get to grips with the rhythms and syntax. There are passages that swell like the incoming tide. Others that seem intentionally dissonant, staccato as the rain beating on a shed roof. Some of the poems are obviously set on the wild cliffs and beaches of Kerry. Others appear to have been written in Dublin. But it’s a lost Dublin. A Georgian city of crumbling 18th century houses and haunted souls inhabiting dark rooms filled with shadows, the scent of beeswax and sexual repression. Houses full of musty perfumes, crowded with unspoken memories. Where others such as Heaney celebrate the warmth of Irish life, Colm attempts to reveal what is taboo. The harshness of the Church. The repression of women. The power of the priests and their sexual misdemeanours. And throughout all the poems there’s the presence of some ethereal other. Martha isn’t sure whether it’s male or female, a lover or a mirrored self. It appears fleetingly as a reflection in a smeared glass and the corner of a dusty pub window or on a lonely windswept beach.
She’s surprised. This isn’t what she’d expected from this young man with the blue woollen hat. She imagined something more traditional. She wonders about his life. What he did in Dublin, whether he’s ever been abroad, if he has a girl friend? She doesn’t even know how old he is.
6
Colm has never belonged to a political party. To the Greens or Fianna Fáil. He thought of joining an environmental group in Dublin but joined a band instead. That’s not because he doesn’t care. He hates this Celtic Tiger bollocks that means everyone is on the gravy train. Those that can doing, those that can’t just getting by or lolling at home on benefits. Europe! The eejits are behaving as though their rich aunty was giving handouts to all the family. There’s money flowing in as if it’s just been invented. Suddenly everyone with a field to sell is a millionaire. Driving round in a 4x4, drinking champagne when a Guinness or stout would do just as well. All round the Dublin docks developers are building apartments the size of shoe boxes to fleece anyone stupid enough to buy them. Everyone is in finance or insurance. Even Kerry is turning into a tourist trap. Killarney and Tralee flaunting their big hotels and golf courses. Out for the Americans who drive round the Ring in their air conditioned buses, little shamrock badges stuck to the lapels of their rainproof jackets. Don’t they realise they’re part of the problem with their Hollywood versions of Irish history, looking for the beach where Ryan’s Daughter was filmed. All along the coast bungalows are springing up blighting this wild place he loves. Kerry people are decent enough. But a breath ago they were peasants taking their milk to market on a donkey cart, believing in fairies and original sin, in immaculate conception and weeping statues. Now they’re all would-be property dealers.
He wonders what Martha will make of his poems. She seems nice enough. Not a bad looking woman for her age. There’s something vulnerable beneath the surface. He’s heard talk about her young son. But Brendan never spoke of him.
Sunday
1
There’s hardly anything left in the cupboards except half a packet of dried pasta, some stock cubes and a few tea bags. She’s been existing on scraps. Cooking doesn’t interest her any more. But she needs some basic supplies and they’re not so easy to come by on a Sunday. She gets into the car and drives down the mountain. It’s a beautiful morning and hard to believe that for the last few days the weather has been so wild and unpredictable. As she heads towards the bay, the sea is calm, the surf white as a wedding dress, the brown mountains behind Waterville soft and undulating. It might almost be spring.
She turns off the main road. If she waits to go for a walk until after she’s been to town the sun might have gone. She parks on a grassy verge and walks to the ruined priory on the beach. A stonemason doing something to the walls wishes her good morning and asks, perhaps because she doesn’t look like a local, if she’s an artist. The tide is out and there’s a strong smell of ozone and seaweed. Groups of black and white wading birds paddle in the shallows searching for shellfish. She’s not sure what they are. Presumably Brendan would have known.
She makes her way through the gate to the churchyard. The religious community established here in the 12th century was small, according to the information on the municipal plaque. After a winter of bad storms the monks on the Skelligs ran out of fresh water and food. Half-starved, and suffering, no doubt, from scurvy and pneumonia, they abandoned their rocky retreat. Here they adopted the Augustinian rule. Moving away from the extreme asceticism endured on their Atlantic eyrie. A notice in both Irish and English says the place is dedicated to St Michael. She wonders who St Michael is and if he’s the same as the angel Gabriel? Much of the monastery is eroded and the roof collapsed. The church and the domestic buildings were arranged around a grath or yard surrounded by covered walkways where the monks worked and prayed. Now only a section of the hall and tower remains. The monks’ cells, the workshops, infirmaries, kitchens, refectories and the guest houses have all gone. Six hundred years ago the matins’ bell would have called the community to early morning prayer. Its ghostly reverberations carrying across the bay in the mist to Horse Island.
All the headstones look out to sea. Some are inscribed in Gaelic. Others worn down like broken teeth from the salt wind. The more recent graves are marked by black marble slabs with machine-etched crucifixions and lachrymose Virgin Marys. Presumably that’s how they come from the undertakers or whoever it is that supplies headstones. You pay your money and take your pick from the catalogue. A cherub for Auntie Maeve. A cross with ivy garlands for Uncle Sean. Many of the stones have been ripped up and smashed in recent storms when the waves breached the church wall. Plastic roses and Christmas wreaths lie tossed and sodden. A string of rosary beads hangs from the broken finger of a concrete angel.
The same names occur again and again. Sugrue. O’Sullivan. O’ Connor. Murphy. A large granite stone was erected in 1973 to John P Shea and his wife Kathleen by their grandchildren in the USA. Why had they left Ballinskelligs? What had made them pack up their beds and blankets, their clocks and china and ship them all the way to New York? Martha imagines their offspring with their American accents and white American teeth, watching the Pittsburgh Pirates or the Detroit Tigers, cheering on their favourite pitcher at the Saturday afternoon match, before returning to their lives as lawyers, plumbers or doormen, with Ireland little more than a quaint memory. She walks on past a plaster cherub and a headless saint kneeling on either side of a white concrete heart.
In memory of baby Mary Josephine O’Connell, died 5th December 1963. RIP. Erected by her parents.
2
She turns away quickly and heads back to the car but just as she’s pulling out onto the main road an old man flags her down. She
stops to give him a lift. As he opens the door and climbs in beside her, she realises he reeks. But it’s too late. There’s nothing for it but to drive him to where he wants to go. She can hardly make out his thick Kerry accent but understands that he’s on his way to the garage to place his weekly order. It’s the only shop for miles around that apart from selling petrol and diesel also stocks turf briquettes and bundles of kindling, aged carrots, shrivelled apples, biscuits and tea. She drops him in the forecourt and, as he staggers out clutching his string bag, winds down the window to let in some fresh air.
It’s fifteen miles to Caherciveen across the moors. The mostly 19th century buildings in Market Street are painted yellow and blue, blue and red, red and green. Many sport Republican flags. There’s an abundance of charity and Celtic crafts shops and, for a small town, pubs. There’s Kelly’s Bar, the Shebeen, the Kerry Coast Inn, the Townhouse Lounge, The Harp Bar, The Anchor Bar, Craineen’s, The Corner House, Cha Healy’s, Tom’s Tavern, The Skellig Rock, The Fertha Bar and Mike Murts, its windows thick with grime and crammed with what appears to be the entire contents of someone’s attic. Rusty Oxo tins, an old fashioned soda siphon, packets of Player’s No 6, a ball of string, a green and white tin of Castrol Grease. A ship in a bottle, a wooden plaque that says: Love thy neighbour—but don’t get caught, a collection of horse shoes, a stone hot water bottle and a red tobacco tin of Maltan Rich Dark Flake. Several cut throat razors, a scythe, a tap and an old felt hat.